Cultural Critique

Introduction

Located outside New York City, Ellis Island served as the most successful immigration processing station for six decades, until 1954, when the federal government closed it for good.¹ History keeps ambivalent records of the place, which, in keeping with incomers’ experiences, is remembered as the “Isle of Hope,” the “Isle of Tears,” and the “Heartbreak Island” (Kraut, 53). For aspirers to the American dream, the immigration station signified the fear of disease and expulsion. For American citizens, however, Ellis Island confirmed the vitality and attraction worldwide of the American dream, even as it secured national borders against unwanted incomers. In its dual role as national symbol and immigration buffer, Ellis Island is reminiscent of the eternal antagonism in U.S. history between the national celebration of immigrant origins and the desire to exclude certain immigration groups. Whichever way the historical balance might tilt, it is certain that Ellis Island, as the first and largest processing station in the United States, cleared the way for the later inspection site of Angel Island, opened in 1910 for Chinese immigrants, and for the notorious El Paso border delousing practices. Ellis Island marks one more sequel in the long chain of U.S. integrationist policies, not unlike other state projects, all characterized by the attempt to define and delineate the form and content of the ideal nation.

The nation-state has long been theorized in terms of language, gender, race, and ethnicity, but there has been scarce attention given to the ideals of ablebodiedness underlying nationalist projects. Similarly, immigration, itself the focus of nationalist policies, has benefited [End Page 137] only recently from an intersectional approach inclusive of disability. Any nation, its imaginary community notwithstanding, relies for its ideological survival not only on linguistic, gender, and racial uniformity but also on entrenched ideals of health and ability. Despite the close ties between ableism and nationalist policies and despite the fact that foreignness has been constantly medicalized as a contagious threat to the nation-state, only a handful of scholars interrogate from a disability studies perspective the nation-state’s demand for flawless bodies and minds. The present study on Ellis Island is an attempt to situate theories of nationality within a framework informed by disability studies. Ellis Island represents, I contend, an institutionalized discourse that promotes the ideal nation-state at the expense of the disabled and diseased alien bodies on the island.

According to Etienne Balibar, the nation is an ideology that survives through invented narratives of stable territories, generational continuity, and “fictive ethnicity.” Balibar provides an insightful account of national ideologies, but he overlooks the most pervasive ideological fabrication underlying any nation-state—the ideology of ablebodiedness. From a disability studies perspective, Ellis Island functions to remap the ideological underpinnings of the American nation according to ideals of health and ability. Moreover, an intersectional analysis of the immigration policies enforced on Ellis Island with an emphasis on disability would further complicate the Balibarian theory of the nation-state. My goal here, following Balibar’s notion of fictive ethnicity, is to propose the idea of fictive ability, a concept designed to examine the role that ableist values play in immigration policies generally and in Ellis Island immigration regulations particularly.

Fictive ability as an ideology contains human bodies within a public health system, confining individuals to a coherent narrative of ablebodiedness that undergirds national communities. Like other social identities, ability is a sociohistorical construction that functions to differentiate, marginalize, and control individuals under the aegis of the nation’s well-being. In public parlance, however, ability is conceived as anything but a social fabrication. Current scholarship stresses the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality, but theoretical efforts to demystify the ideology of ablebodiedness, though growing in number, have not yet gained wide acceptance in academic discourse. Fictive ability, then, represents an effective state ideology that not only [End Page 138] sets up its own hierarchical system but also lends support to oppressive structures of class, gender, race, and sexuality.

To this point, both immigration and public health scholars have addressed rather successfully...